Gift Guides Are Just the Tip of the Commerce Content Iceberg — For Now

The latest Digiday piece on the role of gift guides in Q4 commerce strategies (*) captures an important shift: AI is redefining how editorial content drives discovery and sales.

What used to be seasonal inspiration has become a structural pillar of the new commerce media economy.

At Contalto, we’ve been analyzing that transformation at scale. Since January 2025, our Commerce Content Intelligence has tracked more than 80,000 commerce content articles from premium publishers — a number that will exceed 100,000 by year-end.

Our data reveals the composition of the ecosystem:

So far this year, gift guides represent just 2% of commerce content output — but that share is about to rise sharply.

As we move into the Q4 holiday period, publishers ramp up curated gifting content, combining editorial trust, affiliate opportunity, and AI visibility.

In fact, as the Digiday article points out, gift guides are now key “signals” in AI-powered discovery systems — helping brands surface in search and recommendation contexts driven by credibility and curation.

This confirms the broader picture we’re seeing: commerce content is not one format but an ecosystem — diverse, data-rich, and continuously measurable.

At Contalto, our mission is to map and measure this ecosystem — helping publishers, brands, and agencies benchmark visibility, understand partnership dynamics, and quantify how content drives commerce.

Discover how Contalto’s Commerce Content Intelligence maps the evolving content-to-commerce ecosystem:

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(*) Read Digiday's article: here